A Tragic Mistake In A Just Cause

President Clinton and other NATO leaders made one of the biggest understatements of the Kosovo conflict when they called NATO's bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade a "tragic mistake."

It was that and more. How did the CIA manage to mistake a well-recognized Chinese diplomatic mission for a Yugoslavian arms agency? Coming on the heels of other recent intelligence failures, this makes the nation's chief intelligence service seem like the gang that couldn't spy straight.

Aside from the loss of innocent Chinese lives and the anger it inspired in Beijing, the embassy bombing damaged NATO's and Russia's intensifying peacemaking efforts and made all the more difficult the task of getting China to approve any eventual United Nations solution to the Kosovo crisis.

All that said, the Friday night fiasco in Belgrade in no way changes the moral calculus in the Yugoslavian conflict: This war is about stopping a power-hungry, bloodthirsty dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, from committing acts that, if they are not genocide, are the next thing to it. NATO must not be deterred from what is still a just cause.

Milosevic takes heart every time NATO stumbles, because he aims to split the alliance and ride out the bombing campaign. That's what makes the Chinese embassy bombing--and the "intelligence failure" that led to it--so galling.

U.S. officials point out that NATO has flown 18,000 sorties against Yugoslavia so far, and only 12 have gone astray. War is a deadly, inexact business. That's why NATO worked so long and hard to negotiate a solution in Kosovo before launching airstrikes March 24. Milosevic refused, opting for ethnic cleansing.

CIA director George Tenet should be asking tough questions and demanding hard answers about this latest foul-up. Without question it was a mistake--the U.S. and NATO had no reason to target the Chinese embassy and would have been crazy to do so even if they had--but that should be the beginning of the inquiry, not the end.

At the same time, the U.S. must make clear to Beijing that it will be accountable if any harm comes to American diplomatic personnel in China. Chinese anger is understandable, but in a country where no protest occurs without government approval, it cannot be acceptable for mobs to inflict intentional violence in retribution for an accident of war.

NATO has expressed its deep regret and apologized, as it should have. China has registered outrage, which was justified. But remember, China also was outraged when NATO took a stand to fight ethnic cleansing.